Archive for October, 2012

Would you like to have an extra special Saturday night salad meal? Maybe you are entertaining friends and family, or perhaps you are trying to make an impression on someone new. Either way, truly special and naturally healthy meals are easy when you eat the HumanaNatura way and follow HumanaNatura’s OurPlate guidelines. All you need to do is to add an extra ingredient or two, and you can quickly create a memorable and impressive meal. Here’s a great example.

Our Saturday Date Salad Meal literally includes dates and, combined with other fresh natural ingredients, leaves a delicious impression that lasts. The salad begins with a fillet of salmon, that’s pan-seared with red onion, garlic bits, turmeric, and black pepper and then cooked covered on medium heat until done.

As this extra-healthy fish variety cooks, we prepare an amazing veggie and fruit complement. On top of a base of mixed greens, we add halved and sliced Persian cucumber, sliced and cut avocado, halved grape tomatoes, and a generous amount of coarsely chopped medjool dates. It’s all combined and garnished simply with parsley, lemon, and black pepper. An easy, gorgeous, and satisfying meal that is sure to make for a great Saturday night dinner, any day of the week.

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals through OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s simple optimal eating guide and meal rating tool, and experience how this science-based and 100% natural approach to daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, you can explore your many opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – via HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness. Check out an overview of our health programs at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

Our Natural Truth campaign takes on common natural health, fitness, and quality of life proposals, and looks to see if they fit the facts or come up short.

In the campaign, all health-related ideas are fair game – including popular health-related beliefs, medical and professional orthodoxies, mainstream and alternative models for modern life and health improvement, and practices impacting our planet’s ecosystems and human sustainability.

Health Fact Vs. Fiction

Why HumanaNatura’s Natural Truth campaign? Simply put, we are all surrounded by a great deal of health and quality of life information in the modern age. Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, much of this information turns out to be misinformation.

Many of us of course sense the large and still growing body of health misinformation around us. This important feature of contemporary life is in part a product of the ease of communication in an Internet age. It is in part a consequence of the lingering effects of pre-modern and pre-scientific thinking, and the natural inertia of widely or passionately held ideas more generally. More subtly, it in part reflects our modern isolation from nature, and often limited immediate consequences from even significant errors in our health judgments.

In any case, modern health misinformation not only reduces the quality of our health understanding, it also can lead to general skepticism about the natural health field and alternative models of human flourishing more broadly. And just as importantly, health misinformation and skepticism can lead to greater health rationalization and resignation – feelings that we can or must accept our health and lives as they are, since we see only questionable or dismissible alternatives.

What a predicament – especially since the reverse is true. In our time, and through progressive science, we now have new, verifiable, and transforming natural health and quality of life enablers at hand!

Ensuring meal variety and enjoyment is crucial, if you want to sustain and make the most of eating the HumanaNatura way and using HumanaNatura’s OurPlate guidelines. One way of doing this is by turning tasty protein foods normally eaten only at holidays, like turkey or roasts, into everyday foods. This change can be an unexpectedly good strategy for varying our meals, since many holiday foods are inexpensive away from holidays…and often are easily prepared in simple and creative ways that are healthy, quick, and a great break from more traditional day-to-day foods.

Today’s “holiday anytime” salad meal begins with a small turkey breast that’s pan-seared on both sides and then cooked covered on medium heat with onion and garlic bits, turmeric, paprika, parsley, and black pepper. After cooking for about 15 minutes and then allowed to cool a few more, it’s sliced and served with mixed greens, sliced baby cucumber and red onion, halved grape tomatoes, and a bit of diced mango . This simple but festive and satisfying mix of foods is garnished with a reprise of parsley, paprika, lemon, and black pepper. A great blend of warm and cool, spicy and sweet, holiday and everyday!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals through OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s simple optimal eating guide and meal rating tool, and experience how this science-based and 100% natural approach to daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, you can explore your many opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – via HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness. Check out an overview of our health programs at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.

Are you a creative type? Or would you like to become one? New research suggests this personal quality may be more important to our natural health than many of us realize. Of course, it’s long been known that certain personality features and resulting behavior patterns are associated with superior health and well-being. So the idea that creative traits have practical health and quality of life benefits shouldn’t be a total surprise.

Zinaida Serebriakova Self-Portrait

In the popular Big Five personality model – which emphasizes the traits Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness & Neuroticism – a variety of research has shown some of these traits to be strongly correlated with health, success, happiness, and longevity. Neuroticism, for example, has been found broadly correlated with poorer health outcomes, while Conscientiousness and Agreeableness have been found to accompany or lead to superior states of health and well-being.

New research published in the Journal of Aging and Health, and picked up by the scientific and medical press, examines the trait of Openness and its association with longevity. This research is important because the trait of Openness is defined somewhat more broadly than the other Big Five traits and there is considerable scientific controversy today regarding both how to measure Openness and its health and quality of life consequences.

Home economists say we should never go shopping hungry, since we are apt to make poorer food choices. This isn’t a problem when we eat the HumanaNatura way and follow HumanaNatura’s OurPlate guidelines, even when our refrigerator is running low on food. Why? It’s not only because we get you in the habit of spending all your time in the healthiest parts of your local market, but also because even a bit of HumanaNatura leftovers at home can make for a quick and yummy meal before you shop. Here’s a great example.

This delicious salad meal is light and satisfying, preparing us for shopping or anything else we need to do, and only took about ten minutes to prepare. The salad begins with a small piece of salmon. It’s pan-seared with red onion, garlic bits, turmeric, and black pepper and then cooked covered on medium heat until done. While this extra-healthy fish variety is cooking, we scrounged for the last of the fruit and veggies in our fridge: a bit of arugula, half of a cucumber, a dozen grape tomatoes, an orange, and a still ripe kiwi lurking in back. It’s all combined and garnished with parsley, paprika, lemon, anise seeds, and black pepper. A beautiful and delicious way to make the best of whatever you’ve got on hand!

Learn more about creating naturally delicious and optimally nutritious meals through OurPlate, HumanaNatura’s simple optimal eating guide and meal rating tool, and experience how this science-based and 100% natural approach to daily meals can change the way you eat, feel, and live. Perfect your skills at making delicious and naturally healthy salad meals that follow the OurPlate guidelines via the Meals tab above, our popular article Perfect Salad Meals, or the Natural Eating section of our comprehensive Personal Health Program.

Once you have begun eating the HumanaNatura way, you can explore your many opportunities for new, more natural, and healthier life between meals – via HumanaNatura’s complete and naturally open-ended system for lifelong and lifewide health and fitness. Check out an overview of our health programs at The Four HumanaNatura Techniques.